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I have always tried to make it VERY clear (no matter what the idiots automatically presume) that I am NOT a conspiracy theorist and that my theory of the Penn State/Sandusky "scandal" is NOT based in any sort of extensive "conspiracy."

Re: NCAA Penn State Penalties

Maybe now Joe can finally be honored properly, now that the fairy tale of a cover up has been thrown out

How Former PSU President Graham Spanier Got Convicted For Something He Didn’t Do

by John Ziegler | 4:43 pm, March 24th, 2017

Over five years after the story exploded and became the most controversial scandal in the history of college sports, former Penn State University President Graham Spanier was finally acquitted today of the “conspiracy” charge against him, but convicted on only one of two charges of “endangering the welfare of a child.” He was found guilty of something for which there is no evidence nor logic indicating that he committed a crime and, most amazingly, it happened without his lawyers even putting on a case.

Despite having no connection to Penn State, I have investigated the entire “Jerry Sandusky Scandal” on almost a full-time basis, for no money, for most of the past five years. I have spoken to Spanier for many hours and dealt with him extensively. I also attended his trial and I am 100% positive that he never had any idea that Sandusky might have been a pedophile, and that he acted almost exactly as he should have throughout the entire situation.

So, how could something like this have happened in our judicial system? The real story is far too involved to tell in just one short story, but here is essence of it.

From the very beginning, Spanier and Penn State got caught up in a media firestorm they didn’t see coming because they all honestly thought that Jerry Sandusky was innocent and that, even if he wasn’t (at least in a remotely rational world), they knew they had no culpability for the crimes of a former employee. So when in November of 2011 it was leaked that Penn State assistant coach Mike McQueary had supposedly testified to a grand jury that about a decade before (he got the date, month, and year of the episode wrong) he had witnessed Sandusky “raping” a boy, they were completely stunned and unprepared for the media-created terror which would ensue.

Spanier’s first instincts, which were correct, were to strongly back the two highly-respected long-time Penn State administrators, Tim Curley and Gary Schultz, who were being charged with a series of serious crimes related to covering up for Sandusky (I and many others close to the case are now completely convinced that the state’s primary objective in charging them was actually to destroy two of Sandusky’s strongest witnesses). He released a statement doing so before the news media suddenly decided, thanks to the tangential involvement of legendary head football coach Joe Paterno, that this story was now the most outrageous thing that has ever happened in the history of Pennsylvania.

The statement, which was perfect given the information he had at the time, backfired on him because it was somehow seen as not being accepting enough, before anyone in the case had even spoken publicly, that all of those being implicated, including Sandusky, were clearly guilty. In short, Spanier, an esteemed and very liberal university president, had committed a violation of “political correctness.”

You see, when a witch hunt is underway, you aren’t allowed to defend yourself or anyone else who might be even remotely involved. You must accept the popular narrative as true and then beg for forgiveness, even if what is being alleged is totally false and without evidence or logic.

In a pure panic, the Penn State board, guided by then-Governor Tom Corbett (who had a major feud with Spanier over education funding the previous spring), fired Joe Paterno and forced Spanier to resign. That was then seen, effectively, as a guilty plea on behalf of the entire school and it provoked a firestorm of injustice which seemingly will never stop.

Paterno almost immediately died and Sandusky, without a single continuance or a shred of hard evidence, was convicted just seven months after his arrest. The firings created a huge backlash in the Penn State community and forced the board to justify what they did. That led to them paying Louis Freeh many millions of dollars for the “Freeh Report” to conclude that there was a cover-up. This then incited the NCAA to act with record speed to institute sanctions (which will later be revoked), thus further setting in stone the completely false narrative of a cover up. This then gave the Attorney General’s office the leverage to charge Spanier himself, thus also shutting up a strong voice for what really happened here.

Meanwhile, Penn State, eager to show the world and news media how much they “get it,” spent about $100 million dollars in tax-payer money in totally un-vetted settlements for Sandusky’s accusers. This even further established the false narrative, especially when overtly absurd stories were selectively leaked to an easily duped news media all too eager to substantiate their original rush to judgement in this case.

At each point in this battle, those on the other side who were morally certain that they and those they support had done nothing wrong kept thinking that they could cede each piece of land because it wasn’t the proper hill to “die” on. They kept having faith that as time passed and the extreme emotion this case had triggered finally died down, that the system would work. Surely, they believed, if a fair jury ever heard this case that the truth would come out and justice would finally be done.

What they miscalculated was that which each retreat their position got weaker and the public became both convinced of total guilt and stopped being open-minded, or even caring about it. There was no greater proof of this than the completely nonsensical verdict in Mike McQueary’s civil suit, which showed just how incredibly polluted the jury pool in Pennsylvania is on this case.

Knowing this is what they faced, last week Curley and Schultz took a plea bargain which gave them a misdemeanor conviction for endangering the welfare of a child. In a remotely normal case, they would get zero prison time and this would be seen as a near total repudiation of the state’s original and laughably overcharged case against them. Instead, the media dutifully did the state’s bidding by ludicrously portraying this development as an admission of a cover up (anyone who objectively saw their testimony this week would realize this interpretation is beyond preposterous).

At that point, Spanier, who rejected the same plea deal, was basically boxed in. Only a very aggressive defense which sought to blow up the many misperceptions about this case could have saved him from at least a minor conviction. Instead, the defense (directly against my many urgings/warnings) decided to curl up into the fetal position and rely solely on the reality that, according to the law, the state didn’t come close to proving their case.

Not only did they not even attempt to confront several prosecution witnesses (out fear of being politically incorrect again) who could have been very easily discredited, they literally didn’t even put on a defense. Former NCIS and FIS special agent John Snedden (whose report for the federal government led to Spanier’s top secret security clearance being renewed after the scandal broke, which I released exclusively here last week) traveled many hours to be the defense’s star witness, as was promised to the jury, but at the very last moment the defense, in an act of extreme naiveté, decided to rest without calling any witnesses.

At that moment I knew that the jury that I had seen, which surely had been brainwashed by almost six years of unfair media coverage, was never going to be able to navigate through the fog of emotion on which the prosecution completely relied and thus be able to see that there was no case here on the facts or the law (or that a conviction of any kind here sets an incredibly dangerous precedent for educators everywhere).

I doubt there has never been a case which more clearly echoed Ben Franklin’s famous quote “We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately” than this one. We now have four previously esteemed men who have been unfairly hanged (without even putting up a decent fight in court) all of whom know they are innocent and believe that all the others are as well.

The real story here is the most amazing thing I have ever seen. Sadly, I doubt it will ever be properly told.

[image screen grab via ABC News]

John Ziegler hosts a weekly podcast focusing on news media issues and is documentary filmmaker. You can follow him on Twitter at @ZigManFreud or email him at johnz@mediaite.com

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

Re: NCAA Penn State Penalties

An innocent man is in jail and a coaching legend destroyed because of this piece of shit

I present to you, the 'boy in the shower "

Friday, September 29, 2017

Boy In The Shower Says He Can't Remember 34 Times

By Ralph Cipriano
for BigTrial.net

Allan Myers, the boy in the Penn State showers that Mike McQueary allegedly saw being raped by Jerry Sandusky, sure has a lousy memory.

Myers couldn't remember when a picture of him posing with Sandusky had been taken, even though it was at Myers' own wedding.

Myers couldn't remember what he told a couple of state troopers when they interviewed him in 2011, and Myers said that Sandusky had never abused him.

Myers couldn't remember what he told a private investigator, namely that Mike McQueary was full of crap, and that nothing sexual had happened in that shower.

A 48-page transcript from a Nov. 4, 2016 hearing where Myers was called as a witness as part of Sandusky's bid for a new trial was released for the first time earlier this week, in response to a request from a reporter for a major mainstream media news outlet. The transcript provides some insight into what is clearly a screwed-up case that the prosecutors and the news media have completely botched.

And they blew it because they showed no skepticism about witnesses like Allan Myers, who, from what he had to say in this transcript, clearly isn't credible.

In the transcript, Myers, who was on the witness stand for less than an hour before Centre County Senior Judge John M. Cleland, said he couldn't recall or didn't remember 34 times.

Either Myers was very forgetful, or he was clearly lying.

Before Myers was brought in as a witness, Sandusky was sworn in and the judge explained to him that since nobody knew what Myers was going to say, his testimony "could be harmful to your case."

But Sandusky had his mind made up.

"It is my decision to have Allan Myers testify," Sandusky told the judge.

Myers, a former Marine, testified that he got to know Sandusky through the former assistant Penn State coach's Second Mile charity.

"Did you think of Mr. Sandusky as a father figure," Al Lindsay, Sandusky's lawyer, asked.

"Yes, I did," Myers said.

Myers was shown a picture of himself and Sandusky at Myers's wedding. Lindsay asked if Myers remembered when that picture was taken.

"That I do not remember," Myers said.

Lindsay showed Myers a photo of a football camp when Myers served as a coach, and posed for a picture with the boys he was coaching, along with Sandusky. Lindsay asked Myers how old he was in the photo.

"I don't remember," Myers said. "I don't even know what year that was."

"Well, were you an adult," Lindsay asked. "Do you know that?"

"I wasn't an adult," Myers said.

"Can you give us any estimate of your age," the lawyer asked.

"No," Myers said.

Myers recalled that he lived in Sandusky's home "right after I graduated high school to attend Penn State."

"And I left there because he [Sandusky] was controlling and I left," Myers said. "And that was the end that I ever lived with him."

Lindsay asked Myers if he remembered being interviewed on Sept. 20, 2011, by state Trooper James Ellis and Corporal Joseph A. Letter.

"I recall being interviewed," Myers said.

Lindsay gave Myers a copy of the police report and asked if it reflected what he told the state troopers.

Lindsay asked Myers if he recalled telling the investigator that on the day McQueary thought he saw an anal rape in the showers, Myers said "Jerry and I were slapping towels at each other trying to sting each other."

Myers was a month short of his 14th birthday in 2001 when the infamous shower incident occurred. Even though the official grand jury report says that Mike McQueary heard "slapping sounds" and witnessed Sandusky raping a 10-year-old boy in the shower.

"I don't recall everything I told Mr. Everhart," Myers said.

Did Myers recall telling the investigator that he used to slap the walls and slide on the shower floor when he was taking a shower with Jerry?

"I can't recall everything I said in that interview back then," Myers said.

Lindsay read out loud a quote from a report that stated what Myers had supposedly told Everhart:

"The grand jury report says Coach McQueary said he observed Jerry and I engaged in sexual activity. That is not the truth and McQueary is not telling the truth. Nothing occurred that night in the shower."

"Do you recall telling him that," Lindsay asked the witness.

"Like I said, I can't recall everything I said back then," Myers said. "But if it's in there, I said it then, yes."

Lindsay asked Myers if he told the investigator that "I never saw McQueary look into the shower that night. I am sure."

"That's what I said back then," Myers said. "Once again, I can't recall what I said then."

Lindsay read Myers more quotes from the interview with the investigator.

Myers became Shubin's ninth victim. He flipped on Jerry, claimed he'd been abused, and collected a reported $3 million.

When asked how much he received from his settlement, Myers said," Im not allowed to answer that question."

Lindsay asked Myers, who wasn't called as a witness during the Sandusky trial, where he was when the trial took place.

"I believe I was somewhere in central Pennsylvania," he said. "Now exactly where I was, I can't recall. I might have been working. I don't know exactly, but I was here in Pennsylvania . . . I was somewhere inside Clinton County or Clearfield County, somewhere in that little Trifecta."

Asked if he could recall being in a specific place, Myers replied, "I can't recall where I was when the trial was going on . . . I can't tell you exactly where I was, I don't remember that."

It was Lindsay's contention that Sandusky deserved a new trial because the prosecutor, Joseph McGettigan, lied to the jury when he said that the existence of Victim No. 2 was "known only to God."

After Myers left the witness stand, Lindsay put Sandusky up to testify as a rebuttal witness.

John Ziegler, a reporter who was in the courtroom when Myers testified, said he was glad that the transcript had finally released.

"This is the only testimony of the person who is the epicenter of this whole thing," Ziegler said about the Penn State scandal.

"And it's obvious to anyone who understand the case that he [Myers] wasn't telling the truth," Ziegler said. "He [Myers] remembers everything up until he flips on Jerry and then he can't remember anything."

Myers' testimony, Ziegler said, was "a hundred percent consistent with a guy who had who had flipped for $3 million and felt bad about it, and didn't want to deal with it anymore."

When Sandusky took the stand, Ziegler recalled, "He was in tears, he was angry. It was righteous anger."

John Snedden, a former NCIS and FIS special agent who investigated the scandal at Penn State, said he was disturbed by Myers' evolving story.

"Being officially interviewed as the 'victim' of a traumatic event doesn't happen everyday," Snedden said. "And then you can't remember the specifics of that interview? Seriously?"

"It's clear why he [Myers] wasn't called by the prosecution" in the Sandusky case," Snedden said. "His testimony is exculpatory and now serves only as an example of blatant prosecutorial manipulation."

Everyone knows the story of Jerry Sandusky, the serial pedophile, the Monster. But what if that story is wrong? What if the former Penn State football coach and founder of the Second Mile is an innocent man convicted in the midst of a moral panic fed by the sensationalistic media, police trawling, and memory-warping psychotherapy? The Most Hated Man in America reads like a true crime psychological thriller and is required reading for everyone from criminologists to sports fans.

“If potential readers are convinced that Jerry Sandusky is guilty, they need to read The Most Hated Man in America. This meticulously researched, provocative, and wonderfully written book by Mark Pendergrast, an enormously important contributor to the repressed memory debate, will certainly make them see another side. Maybe they will think twice.”

-- Elizabeth Loftus, Distinguished Professor of Psychology & Social Behavior, University of California, Irvine, author, The Myth of Repressed Memory and other books.

“The Most Hated Man in America tells a truly remarkable story. In all the media coverage the Sandusky case has received, it’s amazing that no one else has noticed or written about so many of these things, including all the ‘memories’ that were retrieved through therapy and litigation. One would think that the sheer insanity of so much of this will have to eventually come out.”

--Richard A. Leo, Hamill Family Professor of Law and Psychology, University of San Francisco, author, Police Interrogation and American Justice and The Wrong Guys: Murder, False Confessions, and the Norfolk Four

“Virtually everybody knows with certainty that Jerry Sandusky is a serial child molester. He was, after all, found guilty by a jury of his peers. But what if what we think we know about Sandusky is at least in some ways incorrect? Regardless of their ultimate conclusions, readers will find The Most Hated Man in America to be thoughtful and provocative, addressing questions that deserve to be asked in a just society.”

Everyone knows the story of Jerry Sandusky, the serial pedophile, the Monster. But what if that story is wrong? What if the former Penn State football coach and founder of the Second Mile is an innocent man convicted in the midst of a moral panic fed by the sensationalistic media, police trawling, and memory-warping psychotherapy? The Most Hated Man in America reads like a true crime psychological thriller and is required reading for everyone from criminologists to sports fans.

“If potential readers are convinced that Jerry Sandusky is guilty, they need to read The Most Hated Man in America. This meticulously researched, provocative, and wonderfully written book by Mark Pendergrast, an enormously important contributor to the repressed memory debate, will certainly make them see another side. Maybe they will think twice.”

-- Elizabeth Loftus, Distinguished Professor of Psychology & Social Behavior, University of California, Irvine, author, The Myth of Repressed Memory and other books.

“The Most Hated Man in America tells a truly remarkable story. In all the media coverage the Sandusky case has received, it’s amazing that no one else has noticed or written about so many of these things, including all the ‘memories’ that were retrieved through therapy and litigation. One would think that the sheer insanity of so much of this will have to eventually come out.”

--Richard A. Leo, Hamill Family Professor of Law and Psychology, University of San Francisco, author, Police Interrogation and American Justice and The Wrong Guys: Murder, False Confessions, and the Norfolk Four

“Virtually everybody knows with certainty that Jerry Sandusky is a serial child molester. He was, after all, found guilty by a jury of his peers. But what if what we think we know about Sandusky is at least in some ways incorrect? Regardless of their ultimate conclusions, readers will find The Most Hated Man in America to be thoughtful and provocative, addressing questions that deserve to be asked in a just society.”

Re: NCAA Penn State Penalties

Originally Posted by PeggieSue

If there's an innocent man in prison who's working to get him released, haven't kept up with this.

Very few sadly . No one has any incentive to do anything since mostly everyone is fully invested in the false narrative Even though many many people believe Jerry at least deserves a new fair trial, if not believe he is innocent, no one wants to speak out publicly for fear of getting destroyed for that belief .

Now even if you think Jerry is guilty, for anyone to still believe Joe Paterno and Penn State were involved in a cover up, and a HBO movie made that furthers that narrative is downright criminal .

Re: NCAA Penn State Penalties

Originally Posted by brucefan

Very few sadly . No one has any incentive to do anything since mostly everyone is fully invested in the false narrative Even though many many people believe Jerry at least deserves a new fair trial, if not believe he is innocent, no one wants to speak out publicly for fear of getting destroyed for that belief .

Now even if you think Jerry is guilty, for anyone to still believe Joe Paterno and Penn State were involved in a cover up, and a HBO movie made that furthers that narrative is downright criminal .

Re: NCAA Penn State Penalties

JZ # ItStillAmazesMe that Joe Paterno got turned into a pedophile enabler (or worse) by the same media which revered him for decades, just days after he was the key reason Jerry Sandusky was even arrested, & was being praised by the attorney general's office.

A confidential internal review of the Louis Freeh Report on the Penn State sex abuse scandal, conducted behind closed doors for two years by the university's own trustees, found factual mistakes, "deeply flawed" methodology, as well as an alleged conflict of interest on Freeh's part, along with faulty stated opinions that Freeh's own staffers disagreed with, in writing.

It was the Freeh Report that the NCAA relied upon in 2012 to impose draconian sanctions on Penn State, including a $60 million fine, a bowl game ban that lasted two years, the loss of 170 athletic scholarships and the elimination of 111 of Joe Paterno's wins, although the wins were subsequently restored.

On Friday, a group of 11 trustees called on the full 38-member board to release the full 200-page critique of the 267-page Freeh Report, formally renounce Freeh's findings, and try to recoup some of the $8.3 million that the university paid Freeh.

"I want to put the document in your hands so you can read it yourself, but I can't do that today," said Alice Pope, a trustee and St. John's University professor who helped conduct the internal review of the Freeh report. But the materials that Pope and six other trustees had to sue the university to obtain are still under seal according to a 2015 court order. And the university's lawyers have recently advised the 11 minority trustees that the report they worked on for two years remains privileged and confidential.

So yesterday, Pope called on the full board to release the 200-page report as early as their next meeting, on July 20th. But chances are slim and none that the board's chairman, Mark Dambly, and other majority board members will ever willingly open Pandora's box and reveal to the public the facts they've spent at least hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees to bury for the past six years. Facts will present further evidence of just how badly the trustees, Louie Freeh, and the attorney general botched the Penn State investigation.

The full board of trustees, Pope said yesterday, never voted to formally adopt the findings of the Freeh Report, which found that Penn State officials had covered up the sex crimes of Jerry Sandusky.

"Rather, the board adopted a don't act, don't look and don't tell policy" Pope said that amounted to a "tacit acceptance of the Freeh Report." A report that Pope said has resulted in "profound reputational harm to our university along with $300 million in costs so far."

In addition to the $60 million in fines, the university's board of trustees has -- while doing little or no investigating -- paid out a minimum of $118 million to 36 alleged victims of sex abuse, in addition to spending more than $80 million in legal fees, and $50 million to institute new reforms aimed at preventing future abuse.

That internal 200-page report and the materials it draws upon may still be privileged and confidential, But Big Trial has obtained a seven-page "Executive Summary of Findings" of that review dated Jan. 8, 2017, plus an attached 25-page synopsis from that same date that highlights the evidence discovered by the minority trustees in their review of those confidential documents still under court seal.

According to the executive summary, "Louis Freeh and his team disregarded the preponderance of the evidence" in concluding there was a cover up at Penn State of Jerry Sandusky's crimes.

"Louis Freeh and his team knowingly provided a false conclusion in stating that the alleged coverup was motivated by a desire to protect the football program and a false culture that overvalued football and athletics," the executive summary states.

According to the executive summary, the trustees faulted Freeh and his investigators for their "willingness . . . to be led by media narratives," as well as "an over reliance on unreliable sources," such as former Penn State Counsel Cynthia Baldwin.

Freeh, the executive summary states, also relied on "deeply flawed" procedures for interviewing witnesses. The interviews conducted by Freeh's investigators weren't done under oath, or subpoenas, and weren't tape-recorded, the executive summary wrote, providing for "biased reporting of interview data" and "inaccurate summaries" of witness testimony.

At yesterday's press conference, Pope said the 11 trustees wanted to know the degree of cooperation Freeh's team had with the NCAA and the state attorney general's office during their investigations. According to statecollege.com, State Senate Majority Leader Jake Corman has previously stated that the coordination between Freeh and the NCAA during the Penn State investigation was at best inappropriate and at worst "two parties working together to get a predetermined outcome."

In the executive summary, the trustees cited "interference in Louis Freeh's investigation by the Pennsylvania Office of Attorney General, wherein information gathered in the criminal investigations of Penn State officials was improperly (and perhaps illegally) shared with Louis Freeh and his team."

This is a subject Big Trial will explore in a subsequent blog post. But earlier this year, I wrote to Louis Freeh, and asked if he and his team was authorized to have access to grand jury secrets. He declined comment.

Yesterday, Freeh issued a statement that ripped the minority trustees. "Since 2015 . . . these misguided alumni have been fighting a rear-guard action to turn the clocks back and to resist the positive changes which the PSU students and faculty have full embraced," Freeh wrote. He concluded that despite criticism of his report by the minority trustees, to date, they have produced "no report, no facts, news and no credible evidence" that have damaged the credibility of his investigation.

But in the executive summary, the trustees blasted Freeh for having an alleged conflict of interest with the NCAA, and they cited some credible evidence to prove it.

"Louis Freeh's conflict of interest in pursuing future investigative assignments with the NCAA during his contracted period of working for Penn State," the executive summary states, "provided motivation for forming conclusions consistent with the NCAA's goals to enhance their own reputation by being tough on Penn State."

In a criminal manner, such as the Jerry Sandusky pedophilia investigation, the NCAA had no legal standing. But the NCAA justified its intervention in the case by finding that a lack of institutional control on Penn State's part opened the door to the Jerry Sandusky sex scandal.

In their synopsis of evidence, the trustees relied on internal Freeh Group emails that showed that while Freeh was finishing up his investigation of Penn State, he was angling for his group to become the "go to investigators" for the NCAA.

On July 7, 2012, a week before the release of the Freeh Report on Penn State, Omar McNeill, a senior investigator for Freeh, wrote to Freeh and a partner of Freeh's. "This has opened up an opportunity to have the dialogue with [NCAA President Mark] Emmert about possibly being the go to internal investigator for the NCAA," McNeill wrote. "It appears we have Emmert's attention now."

In response, Freeh wrote back, "Let's try to meet with him and make a deal -- a very good cost contract to be the NCAA's 'go to investigators' -- we can even craft a big discounted rate given the unique importance of such a client. Most likely he will agree to a meeting -- if he does not ask for one first."

A spokesman for Freeh could not immediately be reached for comment.

At yesterday's press conference, Pope also raised the issue of a separate but concurrent federal investigation conducted on the Penn State campus in 2012 by Special Agent John Snedden, made public last year, but completely ignored by the mainstream media, that reached the opposite conclusion that Freeh and the attorney general did, that there was no official cover up at Penn State.

Pope stated she wanted to know more about the discrepancies between the parallel investigations that reached such opposite conclusions.

Back in 2012, Snedden, a former NCIS special agent working as a special agent for the Federal Investigative Services [FIS], was assigned to determine whether Spanier deserved to have a high-level national security clearance renewed. During his investigation, Snedden placed Spanier under oath and questioned him for eight hours, as well as interviewed many other witnesses on the Penn State campus, including Cynthia Baldwin, who told him that Spanier was a "man of integrity."

About seven months after Baldwin told Spanier this, she flipped, and appeared in a secret grand jury proceeding to not only testify against Spanier, but also former Penn State Athletic Director Tim Curley, and former Penn State Vice President Gary Schultz.

Baldwin, who had previously represented Spanier, Curley and Schultz before the grand jury, testified last month before the disciplinary board of the state Supreme Court, which has accused her of violating the attorney-client privilege.

After his investigation, Special Agent Snedden concluded in a 110-page report that Spanier had done nothing wrong, and that there was no coverup at Penn State.

That's because, according to Snedden, Mike McQueary, the alleged whistleblower in the case, was an unreliable witness who told many different conflicting stories about an alleged incident in the Penn State showers where McQueary saw Jerry Sandusky with a naked 10-year-old boy. "Which story do you believe?" Snedden told Big Trial last year.

In his grand jury testimony, McQueary said his observations of Sandusky were based on one or two "glances" that lasted only "one or two seconds," glances from an incident at least eight years previous. But in the hands of the attorney general's fiction writers, those glances of "one or two seconds" became an anal rape of a child, conclusively witnessed by McQueary.

On March 1, 2002, according to the 2011 grand jury presentment, [McQueary] walked into the locker room in the Lasch Building at State College and heard “rhythmic, slapping sounds.” Glancing into a mirror, he “looked into the shower . . . [and] saw a naked boy, Victim No. 2, whose age he estimated to be 10 years old, with his hands up against the wall, being subjected to anal intercourse by a naked Jerry Sandusky.”

"The graduate assistant went to his office and called his father, reporting to him what he had seen. The graduate assistant and his father decided that the graduate assistant had to promptly report what he had seen to Coach Joe Paterno . . . The next morning, a Saturday, the graduate assistant telephoned Paterno and went to Paterno's home, where he reported what he had seen."

But the alleged victim of the shower rape never came forward, and, according to the prosecutors, his identity was known "only to God." Days after the presentment, McQueary wrote in an email to the attorney general's office that they had "slightly twisted his words" and, "I cannot say 1000 percent sure that it was sodomy. I did not see insertion."

On top of that, all the witnesses the grand jury presentment claimed that McQueary reported to them "what he had seen," the anal rape of a 10-year-old boy, plus another witness cited by McQueary, a doctor who was a longtime family friend, have all repeatedly denied McQueary told them he ever witnessed an anal rape when they testified in court.

"I've never had a rape case successfully prosecuted based only on sounds, and without credible victims and witnesses," Snedden told Big Trial. He also described the Freeh Report as "an embarrassment to law enforcement."

At the same time Snedden was investigating Penn State, former FBI Director Louis Freeh was writing his report on the Penn State scandal, a report commissioned by the university, at a staggering cost of $8.3 million.

Freeh concluded there had been a cover up. His report also found a “striking lack of empathy for child abuse victims by the most senior leaders of the university,” which included Spanier, who had repeatedly been severely beaten by his father as a child. Freeh found that Spanier, Paterno, along with Schultz, the former Penn State vice president and Curley, the school’s ex-athletic director, “repeatedly concealed critical facts relating to Sandusky’s child abuse from the authorities.”

But critics such as the minority trustees have noted that the ex-FBI director reached his conclusions without his investigators ever talking to Paterno, Schultz, Curley, McQueary or Sandusky. Freeh only talked to Spanier briefly, at the end of his investigation. And confidential records viewed by the trustees show that Freeh’s own people disagreed with his conclusions.

According to those records, Freeh's own staff reviewed a May 21, 2012 draft of the Freeh Report, which was subsequently turned over to Penn State officials. The lead paragraph of the draft said, “At the time of the alleged sexual assaults by Jerry Sandusky, there was a culture and environment in the Penn State Athletic Department that led staff members to fail to identify or act on observed inappropriate conduct by Sandusky.”

The draft report talked about an environment of fear that affected even a janitor who supposedly saw Sandusky assaulting a boy in the showers in 2000: “There existed an environment within the athletic department that led an employee to determine that the perceived threat of losing his job outweighed the necessity of reporting the violent crime of a child.”

Over that paragraph in the draft report, a handwritten note said, “NO EVIDENCE AT ALL!” Freeh, however, in his final version, included that charge about the janitor who allegedly saw Sandusky assault another boy in the showers but was so fearful he didn’t report it.

But when the state police interviewed that janitor, Jim Calhoun, he stated three times that it wasn’t Sandusky he had seen sexually abusing a boy. [The state police didn’t ask Calhoun who was the alleged assailant.] At Sandusky’s trial, however, the jury convicted the ex-coach of that crime, in part because his defense lawyer never told the jury about the janitor’s interview with the state police.

In a written statement, Freeh confirmed that the person who wrote “NO EVIDENCE AT ALL!” was one of his guys.

"Throughout the review at the Pennsylvania State University, members of the Freeh team were encouraged to speak freely and to challenge any factual assertions that they believed are not supported," Freeh wrote on Jan. 10, 2018.

"Indeed the factual assertions of the report were tested and vetted over a period of many months and, as new evidence was uncovered, some of the factual assertions and conclusions evolved," he wrote. "Our staff debated, refined and reformed our views even in the final hours before the report's release."

In another handwritten note on the draft of the report, somebody wrote that there was "no evidence" to support Freeh's contention that a flawed football culture was to blame for the Sandusky sex scandal.

"Freeh knew the evidence did not support this," the executive summary says. But in his final report, Freeh wrote about "A culture of reverence for the football program that is ingrained at all levels of the campus community."

While Freeh concluded there was a coverup at Penn State, his investigators weren’t so sure, according to records cited by the trustees in their executive summary. On March 7, 2012, in a conference call, Kathleen McChesney, a former FBI agent who was one of Freeh’s senior investigators, noted that they had found “no smoking gun to indicate [a] cover-up.”

In a written statement to this reporter, Freeh claimed that shortly after McChesney made that observation, his investigators found “the critical ‘smoking gun’ evidence” in a 2001 “email trove among Schultz, Curley and Spanier.”

In that email chain, conducted over Penn State’s own computer system, the administrators discussed confronting Sandusky about his habit of showering with children at Penn State facilities, and telling him to stop, rather than report him to officials at The Second Mile, as well as the state Department of Public Welfare.

In the email chain, Curley described the strategy as a “more humane approach” that included an offer to provide Sandusky with counseling. Spanier agreed, but wrote, “The only downside for us if the message isn’t ‘heard’ and acted upon [by Sandusky] and we then become vulnerable for not having reported it.”

Curley subsequently told Sandusky to stop bringing children into Penn State facilities, and informed officials at The Second Mile about the 2001 shower incident. But Penn State didn’t inform the state Department of Public Welfare about Sandusky, which Freeh claimed was the smoking gun.

The Freeh investigation, critics say, never adequately resolved that contradiction. In their executive report, the trustees refer to the allegations of a cover up as "unfounded."

By definition, however, a cover-up needs a crime to hide. And Penn State’s administrators have repeatedly testified that when McQueary told them about the 2001 shower incident, he described it as horseplay.

And an earlier 1998 shower incident, referred to by Freeh, was also investigated by multiple authorities, who found no crime, nor any evidence of sex abuse.

Freeh, however, claimed that a trio of college administrators should have caught an alleged serial pedophile who had already been cleared by the Penn State police, the Centre County District Attorney, as well as a psychologist and an investigator from Centre County’s Department of Children and Youth Services. To buy into the conclusions of the Freeh Report, you’d also have to believe that Penn State’s top officials were dumb enough to plot a cover up on the university’s own computers.

Freeh, however, maintained that in the six years since he issued his report, its findings have been repeatedly validated in court.

"The Freeh team's investigative interviews and fact-finding were not biased and no outcome was ever predetermined," Freeh wrote. "Their only mandate, to which they adhered, was to follow the evidenced wherever it led. The final report I issued is a reflection of this mandate."

"The accuracy and sustainability of the report is further evidenced by the criminal convictions of Spanier, Schultz, Curley," Freeh wrote. Other developments that verified the conclusions of his report, Freeh wrote, include "voluntary dismissals by the Paterno Family of their suit against the NCAA, Spanier's dismissal of his defamation suit against Freeh, the jury and court findings in the McQueary defamation and whistleblower cases, and the U.S. Department of Education's five-year investigation resulting in a record fine against Penn State."

Re: NCAA Penn State Penalties

The book naturally is being ignored, but every once in awhile, someone is brave enough actually write review

he Most Hated Man in America: Jerry Sandusky and the Rush to Judgment
Image of The Most Hated Man in America: Jerry Sandusky and the Rush to Judgment
Author(s):
Mark Pendergrast
Release Date:
December 5, 2017
Publisher/Imprint:
Sunbury Press, Inc.
Pages:
400
Buy on Amazon

Reviewed by:
Marilyn Gates
“The Most Hated Man in America is an invaluable cautionary tale about the insidious threat to society of induced moral panics that can easily run away with reason while hijacking facts.”

“How easy it was to erase a man’s past and to construct a new version of him, an overwhelming version, against which it seemed impossible to fight” (Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir)

Apple pie, baseball and, in many regions, football signify everything quintessentially American—right up there with the stars and stripes at the very core of our cultural ideology. Despite our diversity, these symbols have served as unifiers in building a national identity.

College football in particular has served as a rallying point for people from all walks of life, ethnic backgrounds, skin shades, and social strata. You might be on vacation in Timbuktu but wearing the same college booster T-shirt as another tourist waiting for the airport shuttle will guarantee a friendly wave, if not an animated conversation about your team’s performance.

Indeed, in some college tributary areas football is akin to a religion, wherein the game and its most successful coaches and players are revered and almost worshipped as icons. For the general public, athletics, especially football, is the main window through which they view campuses, and it is not surprising that a university’s quality may be conflated with its football record.

In other words, football tends to eclipse the youth educational and moral instructional role, particularly in the big-time programs which are huge income earners these days. The business of college football dovetails with our near-idolatry of the market system such that it’s all about enshrining the brand.

This holds true especially on campuses like Penn State University, where football culture has long been pre-eminent and winning coaches like head coach Joe Paterno and assistant coach Jerry Sandusky gained the status of supreme gods. Paterno was renowned throughout the country as the most victorious coach in NCAA history (409 wins and 37 bowl appearances from 1966 to 2011). Much of this success was attributed to Sandusky’s defensive coaching genius over a 30-year span until 1999 when he retired with special emeritus status to concentrate on the at-risk youth charity The Second Mile he founded in 1977, which also received national accolades.

So, imagine the shock, grief and bewildered outrage fueled by widespread moral panic that erupted in the smug little town of State College, Pennsylvania, when Sandusky was accused of serial sexual abuse of young boys in his charity program, frequently on university property and with the alleged knowledge of university officials, and convicted in 2012 on 45 counts incurring a minimum sentence of 30 years, essentially a life sentence for a man of 67.

The legendary Paterno was fired by the university at age 84 for concealing information about Sandusky’s perversions and died of lung cancer a couple of months later having been stripped by the NCAA of 111 football wins achieved over the 11-year span of the Sandusky child sex scandal. The university president and other senior officials also had to resign.

In The Most Hated Man in America: Jerry Sandusky and the Rush to Judgment acclaimed science writer and seasoned investigative researcher Mark Pendergrast casts a fresh eye on this sensational story of an institutional coverup at the highest levels that continued to expose numerous children to a child-molesting monster in order to protect the reputation of an almighty football program.

Through meticulous research involving two prison visits to Sandusky as well as extensive correspondence with him, plus numerous interviews with Sandusky’s family, friends, colleagues, former participants in The Second Mile, psychologists and other experts, along with detailed combing through police records, legal documents, and other reports, Pendergrast exposes a rat’s nest of glaring inconsistencies, procedural irregularities, and outright fabrications in the case against Sandusky.

What if Jerry Sandusky is an innocent man convicted on the heels of a moral panic fueled by sensationalist media, police trawling, and memory-warping psychotherapy based on discredited repressed memory theory? Pendergrast makes a compelling case for this alternative narrative, but not via a hard sell. Rather, readers are invited to take another look at the real “facts” of the case, or lack thereof, as they emerged, and urged to re-open their minds instead of “rush to judgment.”

Pendergrast does this through an onion-peeling approach, stripping off the layers of the case against Sandusky which was constructed piecemeal over several years. He views the careless haste with which the trial phase was thrown together as spurred by escalating moral panic—a widespread feeling of fear fanned by the media and other vested interests that a loathsome evil threatens the fundamental values and well-being of society.

Seen through this lens, Sandusky was convicted by the court of public opinion long before the final sentencing in a moral stampede of pre-judgment unprecedented in the history of the American justice system.

The first section of the book deals with the creation of Sandusky’s sexual assault victims over more than a decade, from the first few unproven allegations to the active trolling for accusers on the part of the police seeking to build their case.

The second section deals with the rush to judgment on the part of the media, the legal system, and the public, with only a few dissenting voices highlighting the holes in the evidence. The final section offers a short, but eye-opening profile of “the real Jerry Sandusky” and the living death that he endures in jail today. The last chapter, “What’s the Verdict?” reviews the evidence.

“In 1998, the first alarm bell went off when the mother of a Second Mile boy learned that Sandusky had showered naked with her son. She turned him into police, but they couldn’t prove that he had done anything illegal and let him go. Just three years later, grad student Mike McQueary…walked into a Penn State locker room and heard wet slapping sounds that he interpreted as sexual. It was Sandusky with a boy. McQueary alerted Penn State officials, who didn’t inform the police, but merely prohibited Sandusky from working out with boys in Penn State facilities. Finally, in November 2008, a shy fifteen-year-old boy named Aaron Fisher blew the whistle on Sandusky, telling high school officials that he had been touched inappropriately. Psychologist Mike Gillum encouraged the traumatized Fisher to tell him the worst—Sandusky had forced oral sex on him”.

Still, Sandusky was not arrested until three years later, after seven more victims came forward as a result of relentless questioning by police, lawyers, counselors, and psychologists of Second Mile program participants within accessible range of State College and after the university offered big reparation payouts. The vast majority of Second Mile children spoke of Sandusky in glowing terms as a role model. But a few key witnesses had upped the ante, first telling of incidents where nothing really inappropriate occurred which they later elaborated to recount perversions in vivid detail.

There too many instances of the myriad procedural improprieties surrounding the construction of the case against Sandusky to allude to here. Pendergrast does an excellent job at putting together the counter-case of a total miscarriage of justice citing coercion of victims, victims, and witnesses who kept changing their stories, issuing conflicting testimonies, inaccurate time frames, discredited repressed memories, questionable experts, incompetent defense, judicial bias, circumstantial or fabricated evidence and, above all, the trial venue in the small town of State College where most people had some kind of connection to the university and few could retain an open mind.

Most convincing of all, perhaps, is the portrait that emerges of the real Jerry Sandusky who grew up as an only son to parents dedicated to youth social service programs running a community recreation center for children which the young Jerry embraced wholeheartedly.

As an adult, he retained this love for sports, youths, and the social service ethos he attached to this. While he was passionate about his coaching position, the Second Mile program to help troubled youths get back on track through summer camps, sports and embracing them as members of his own family was his reason for living.

A “big kid” himself, taking showers naked after workouts with kids was second nature throughout his life, as was what he called “horsing around” and roughhousing including cracking the backs of kids, patting them on the knee while driving, hugging them, throwing soap, and slapping them with a wet towel. Was the latter the infamous slapping sound that made the witness imagine that Sandusky was having sex with the boy in the shower? Inappropriate behavior for this day and age, to be sure, where we have become sensitized to the importance of personal boundaries, but reflecting a naive old-school Mayberry worldview of idealized father-son relations rather than perversion.

In sum, The Most Hated Man in America “is part psychological thriller, part detective story, and part cautionary tale about how moral panics can be created by our media, public perception, and legal system.” The Sandusky saga has condemned a likely innocent man to die in jail, ruined the lives of his family, erased much of the Paterno legacy, ended administrative careers, and damaged the alleged victims if they have come to believe traumatic events that never occurred.

Furthermore, writing this book might be costly to Pendergrast as well. Under conditions of moral panic not only is this kind of topic toxic, but also the very suggestion that the evil Sandusky is innocent. The fact that the major publishing houses would not touch Pendergrast’s manuscript underscores the venom that continues to accrue to the Penn State child sex scandal.

Who should read the book? Everybody who is convinced that Jerry Sandusky is guilty, especially those who rushed to judgment without examining the facts and those who believe everything they hear from their preferred media.

It should also be read by everyone concerned with upholding a fair and transparent judicial system wherein guilt must by proven, not falsely constructed. And the book should be required reading for those who still believe in the validity of repressed memories “recovered” through psychotherapy and/or coercive interrogation.

Above all, The Most Hated Man in America is an invaluable cautionary tale about the insidious threat to society of induced moral panics that can easily run away with reason while hijacking facts. In an era where claims of “fake news” and “alternative facts” seem to be increasingly common and popular movements such as #MeToo and Times Up can capture public imagination overnight, counter narratives such as Pendergrast’s thoughtful work are more important than ever.

Marilyn Gates is a staff reviewer at New York Journal of Books.

PM Me if you are interested in making money in the business of Fantasy Sports . No Inv Req

On Oct. 1, 2014, Brett Swisher-Houtz, "Victim No. 4" in the Jerry Sandusky sex abuse case was called to testify as a witness in a civil case.

In Philadelphia Common Pleas Court, Penn State University was being sued by its own insurance carrier. The Pennsylvania Manufacturer's Association had taken issue with the large multimillion payouts the university was awarding to 36 young men like Victim No. 4, payments to date that have totaled $118 million.

Steven J. Engelmyer, the lawyer representing Penn State's insurance carrier, had a simple question for Swisher-Houtz, who just a year earlier, on Sept. 12, 2013, had collected a confidential settlement from Penn State of $7.25 million.

“Has anybody from Penn State ever spoken to you?" the lawyer wanted to know.

“Not that I’m aware of,” the witness replied.

image: https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-gD_UksK-n...46.10%2BAM.png
In terms of legal battles, it was easy money. In sex abuse cases, alleged victims can potentially face a grilling from a private investigator, a deposition by a lawyer, and an extensive evaluation conducted by a forensic psychiatrist. They can also be asked to submit to a polygraph test to see if they're telling in truth.

Instead, here's what happened with Swisher-Houtz. On Dec. 4, 2012, lawyers Benjamin D. Andreozzi and Jeffrey Fritz, who did not respond to requests for comment, filed a three-and-a-half-page civil claim on behalf of the alleged victim. It was reviewed on behalf of Penn State by Barbara Ziv, a consulting forensic psychiatrist from Flourtown, PA, as well as law firm headed by Kenneth Feinberg of Washington, D.C.

When asked to specify the facts of his alleged abuse, "where it happened and the date on which it happened," Swisher-Houtz's lawyers wrote, "The instances of abuse were so frequent that Mr. Swisher-Houtz cannot be expected to list them here. In summary, Mr. Sandusky forced Mr. Swisher to engage in oral sex on countless occasions and attempted to penetrate his anus. See Sandusky trial transcript or grand jury reports related to Victim No. 4." The lawyers also submitted a report on the victim's behalf from a licensed psychologist.

Nearly a year later, Swisher-Houtz hit the lottery when the university paid him $7.25 million.

It could have been a rougher road to settlement. In the case of Swisher-Houtz, there was stone-cold proof on tape that the cops had deliberately lied to him to elicit more details of alleged abuse. A suspect therapist had also used widely discredited memory-recovery therapy on Victim No. 4 to elicit testimony that a prominent memory expert stated in court had no credible scientific basis.

At the very least, a skillful interrogator might have succeeded in driving down the price of a settlement. But according to Swisher-Houtz, nobody from the university ever bothered to ask him anything. Penn State just wrote out another big check in its quest to purchase an atonement from scandal.

The Conductor on the Gravy Train

The university trustee who oversaw victim settlements isn't talking, but we have some insight into his mindset thanks to a brief May 17, 2017 recorded interview between a would-be author and Ira Lubert. The Philadelphia real estate guru is the Penn State trustee who oversaw the board’s legal subcommittee, which approved the first 26 multi-million dollar settlement awarded to the alleged victims of Jerry Sandusky. Those 26 claims were subsequently ratified en masse by the entire board, after Lubert assured his fellow trustees that the claimants had been thoroughly vetted.

In a remarkably candid interview of just three and a half minutes, obtained by reporter John Ziegler, Lubert talked about the alleged victims of Sandusky, none of whom had attended Penn State. Lubert colorfully described the claimants as being lined up "at the trough" waiting on the “gravy train.”

Lubert blamed the university's plight on poor judgment exercised by Penn State's top officials. He was presumably talking about former university President Graham Spanier, Vice President Gary Schultz, Athletic Director Tim Curley, and Coach Joe Paterno.

"I believe all four of them were great people; I have a lot of respect for all of them," Lubert said.

In the taped interview, Lubert, who did not respond to several requests for comment, was generous in his praise of Penn State's top officials, before burying them.

"I think they did amazing things for the university," Lubert said. "But all four used poor judgment and poor leadership. And as a result of that, they couldn't continue to lead our university."

Lubert singled out Spanier for not being proactive in his discussions with other administrators about Sandusky's habit of showering with young boys, as evidenced by two separate incidents in 1998 and 2001. According to Lubert, Spanier supposedly decided, "I'm not gonna call human services or research any further whether something happened or didn't happen" when it came to Sandusky and the boys in the shower.

"And then it cost us $200 million to settle this. And he stays on as president," Lubert huffed about Spanier. "That can't happen."

Lubert turned his attention to the question of whether Penn State's top officials committed any crimes.

"I was surprised when they pled guilty," Lubert said, presumably about Schultz and Curley. "I don't think they broke the law. I think they used very poor judgment. And, as I said to you, very poor leadership . . . That doesn't make them bad people. It just means you can't work at Penn State or any other university or any company when you demonstrate that failure in leadership."

"I fired him for that reason," Lubert said, presumably talking about Spanier. "Not because he broke the law but because he used bad judgment."

Lubert talked about "all these theories" and various "snippet[s] of information" out there about the Sandusky case, and then returned to his bottom line.

"But at the end of the day, we have five people," Lubert said, presumably throwing Sandusky into the mix, along with Spanier, Schultz, Curley and Paterno.

image: https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-gF3KmU1Qm...47.48%2BPM.png
"Two were convicted, two pled guilty and one said in hindsight, I wished I'd done more," Lubert said. He was talking in private to a would-be author who was a former Second Mile kid himself, somebody who believed that Sandusky was innocent, and that the young men who accused him of sex abuse were lying.

But Lubert wasn't buying it.

"To say you think nothing happened and that Jerry was totally innocent, I just have trouble with all of the other facts surrounding why all that happened to all those five guys," Lubert said, returning to the top Penn State officials caught up in the scandal.

About the claimants, Lubert stated categorically, "They're not all victims. There's some that were on the gravy train. There's some [claims] that we settled for $100,000 that would have cost us more to litigate. But there were some real victims. . . [some who] tried to commit suicide. I was in a position to see it."

“There’s some very bad situations,” Lubert concluded. “Did some people exaggerate their situations? Yes, they did. Did some lawyers step in front and say this is far worse than it was and I want more money? Absolutely, that happened. And wherever I could, I settled it. But believe me when I tell you, there was some bad stuff going on."

The Master of Disasters

To initiate their claims of abuse, lawyers for the alleged victims typically filed a "confidential intake questionnaire" that marked the official start of the "Feinberg & Rozen Claims Resolution Process." In a couple of cases, the victims also filed civil lawsuits where university officials and trustees were deposed.

To get paid, an alleged victim had to be a verified member of the Second Mile, Sandusky's charity for at-risk kids. It also helped to have testified against Sandusky at his criminal trial in 2012, as did eight of the 36 alleged victims, a trial where Sandusky was found guilty of 45 counts of abuse.

For an alleged victim to get paid, it also helped to have reports from licensed psychologists, and medical records submitted for review. To get paid, a claimant had to have his paperwork reviewed by Dr. Ziv, and receive a favorable recommendation to settle the case from the law firm of Feinberg Rozen LLP of Washington D.C.

Kenneth Feinberg, dubbed "The Master of Disasters," is the lawyer they called in to approve mass billion-dollar payouts to the victims of 9/11, the BP oil spill, the Virginia Tech shootings, and the Boston Marathon bombing. Besides presiding over terrorist attacks and natural disasters, Feinberg has overseen large billon dollar settlements in class action suits for pain and suffering caused by Agent Orange and the Dalkon Shield. In big disaster cases, Feinberg takes a global approach to settlements, rather than duking it out on one claim after another in the civil courts.

"In certain very limited types of mass disasters, there's gotta be a better way than one-by-one courts," Feinberg told The Observer in 2016. "These programs . . . do that. And they're very successful."

It was also successful for Feinberg Rozen, which, as of January 2017, had been paid $1,484,094 by Penn State, after the law firm approved the first 28 settlements in the Sandusky case.

Feinberg, responding to an email requesting comment, said there wasn't much light he could shed on the process of vetting claims at Penn State.

"The mediation process was highly confidential and I am not at liberty to answer any questions you may pose concerning the value of the claims or other related details," Feinberg wrote in an email. He referred questions to Joseph O'Dea, the lawyer who represented Penn State in the claim mediation process. O'Dea declined comment, referring questions to Lawrence Lokman, a university spokesperson.

"We have no comment for you," Lokman wrote in an email. "The university's perspective on the settlements, and Ken Feinberg's Op-ed describing the process are a matter of public record."

In that 2016 Op-ed piece, Feinberg wrote, "The [claim mediation] process was thorough, fair, respectful and characterized by full arms-length debate in each case." He described the resulting settlements as "a remarkable achievement given the high-profile nature of the cases."

"Preventing years of expensive, protracted, and uncertain litigation will save Penn State millions of dollars, while sparing the victims who brought their cases forward the agony of an extended legal battle," Feinberg wrote. "I believe the Penn State mediation is a model of how such a dispute resolution process should work."

An "Absence of Documentation"

Not everyone agreed with Feinberg's rosy assessment of the claim mediation process. In 2013, the payouts prompted the university’s insurance carrier, the Pennsylvania Manufacturers Association Insurance Company (PMA), to sue Penn State and the various “John Doe” claimants. The lawsuit ended three years later in a confidential settlement that lawyers in the case say they are prohibited from discussing.

One of those lawyers is Eric Anderson of Pittsburgh, an expert witness who testified on behalf of the insurance carrier. Although he declined to talk about the case, Anderson wrote a report that was disclosed in court records, a report that ripped the university.

“It appears as though Penn State made little effort, if any, to verify the credibility of the claims of the individuals,” Anderson wrote on October 5, 2015. In his report, Anderson decried “the absence of documentation” in the claims, saying in many cases there was “no signed affidavit, statement or other means of personal verification of the information which I reviewed."

The lawyer suggested that “potential punitive damages . . . factored into Penn State’s evaluations,” along with “a concern about publicity and a desire to resolve the matters very quickly.”

The Catholic Comparison

The average settlement at Penn State was $3.3 million, more than double the highest average settlements paid out to alleged victims of sex abuse in the Catholic clergy scandals, such as in:

-- Boston, where the church in 2003 paid $85 million to 552 alleged victims, an average settlement of $153,985.

-- Los Angeles, where the church in 2006 paid $60 million to 45 alleged victims, an average of $1.3 million.

-- Los Angeles, where the church in 2007 paid $660 million to 508 alleged victims, an average of $1.3 million.

-- San Diego, where the church in 2007 paid $198 million to 144 alleged victims, an average of $1.4 million.

Throwing Gasoline on a Fire

Another factor that may have led to higher settlements at Penn State was the publication of the Freeh Report of 2012, which blamed the university's football culture for the scandal, and accused Penn State's top administrators of engaging in a cover up.

Gary Langsdale, the university’s risk officer, was deposed in the insurance case on May 30, 2014. At the deposition, Engelmyer, the insurance carrier’s lawyer, asked Langsdale if he had any concerns about the impact the Freeh Report would have on claims of abuse.

“The report seemed to throw gasoline on a fire,” Langsdale replied.

Engelmyer turned to the university's efforts to vet the claims.

"Tell me what steps Penn State took to confirm that the claimants that they were paying are, in fact credible and were telling true stories," the lawyer asked.

"I read through the material that was provided by the victim's attorney, considered it in context with what we were told by Dr. [Barbara] Ziv was Mr. Sandusky's pattern of abuse, listened to Feinberg and Rozen on the subject, listened to Dr. Ziv on the subject," Langsdale testified.

The lawyer asked Langsdale if he had any concerns that Dr. Ziv, the psychologist hired by the university as an expert to evaluate claims, “did not interview any of the first 26 or so victims who received payments from Penn State?”

“Not particularly,” Langsdale said.

"Why not," Engelmyer asked.

"Because I thought the process is robust enough to give us a good picture of the claims," Langsdale said.

Dr. Ziv could not be reached for comment. She was a prominent witness at the Bill Cosby rape trial, where she testified about common "rape myths" regarding the behavior of victims of sex abuse. One of those myths, Dr. Ziv told the jury, was that victims lie.

No more than seven percent of sex abuse claims are false, Dr. Ziv told the jury. She added that the actual percentage of false claims could be as low as two percent.

Dr. Ziv was clearly a believer in the overall veracity of alleged victims of sexual abuse, so it makes sense why she wouldn't have to personally interview alleged victims to certify their accounts as true. University officials, however, subsequently decided to change their hands-off approach to claimants, when it came to having a psychiatrist review those claims.

In 2015, the university began hiring psychiatrists to examine the claimants, beginning with Skyler Coover, No. 29 on the list, who was paid $7 million. The exams didn't seem to lower the price of settlements. Besides Coover, six more claimants were examined by university psychiatrists, and all seven of those victims collected a total of $27.8 million, or $3.97 million each.

In contrast to Dr. Ziv's faith in the veracity of alleged victims of abuse, a judge recently questioned the credibility of Glenn Neff, an alleged victim of Sandusky's who was attempting to gain immediate access to the confidential settlement of $7 million that he received last year from Penn State.

According to the Chester County Daily Local News, on July 17th, Chester County Judge William P. Mahon "angrily dismissed" a request to transfer assets from Neff's multimillion-dollar settlement that was sought by a Delaware-based financial firm. The newspaper did not name Neff as a victim, because of a typical media policy of self-censorship when it comes to alleged victims of sex abuse, but Neff's name was printed on legal documents in the case.

According to the newspaper, the Delaware firm sought court approval of a plan to convert $2.99 million from Neff's 2017 settlement into $850,000 in cash. In court, Neff testified that he needed the money to bolster his tree-trimming business and his wife wanted to expand a beauty salon.

But Judge Mahon said the proposed settlement, the third in the case, was "riddled with sketchy assertions about [Neff's] financial well-being that were contradicted by statements" Neff made in court.

"I am beginning to wonder what the heck is going on," the judge said, adding "these petitions are completely unreliable."

"This is abysmal," the judge said, before declaring, "Petition dismissed." The judge compared the behavior of the many firms seeking to gain access to Neff's settlement by offering immediate cash to "sharks with blood in the water."

In his claim, Neff alleged that he was sexually abused by Sandusky "on multiple dates between January 2004 and May 2005," including oral and anal rapes, but didn't tell anybody about it until 2016.

As he left the hearing, according to the story filed by reporter Michael Rellahan, Neff refused to answer a reporter's questions, and Neff's wife "shouted before making an obscene gesture while boarding an elevator."

Rolling Over

As part of their concerted effort to turn the page on the Sandusky scandal, Penn State's board of trustees decided not to publicly contest any of the findings of the Freeh Report. Even though behind closed doors, some trustees were highly critical of the work done by the former FBI director.

On Jan. 14, 2015, Karen Peetz, former president of the board of trustees during the Sandusky scandal, was deposed by lawyer Engelmyer in the insurance case.

In response to questions from Engelmeyer, Peetz criticized Freeh for an "overreach" when he accused Penn State officials of concealing Sandusky's conduct, and having a "striking lack of apathy" for victims.

"His spin on the situation," was how Peetz characterized Freeh's criticisms. When the university hired Freeh, Peetz testified, she expected "nothing but the facts."

"I expected facts," she repeated, but stated that instead of facts, the university got "editorializing" from Freeh. As well as a "kind of dramatization," Peetz said, when Freeh faulted the university's football culture for the sex abuse scandal.

Peetz also stated that she had no idea until she read the Freeh Report that the NCAA was relying on it to punish the university.

"Were you aware that they [the NCAA] were using the Freeh Report as a factual basis for the imposition . . . of sanctions?" Engelmyer asked.

"No," Peetz said.

"When did you first find out?" the lawyer asked. "Was it when you read it?"

"Yes," she said.

But, according to Peetz, rather than take issue with Freeh, a majority of trustees decided to roll over.

"We made a decision not to pick apart the Freeh Report, thinking that that wasn't going to be that helpful to moving forward," Peetz testified.

She added, "There's a group of trustees who would like to do that."

"It just doesn't make sense."

While Penn State took a hands-off approach to investigating claims of abuse, the Archdiocese of Philadelphia had a practice of hiring private detectives to investigate claims.

Jack Rossiter, a former FBI agent of 30 years, investigated more than 150 cases of alleged sex abuse as a private detective employed by the Catholic Archdiocese of Philadelphia between 2003 and 2007.

In a situation involving national publicity, like the Jerry Sandusky case, Rossiter said, you'd have to be on guard for criminals and drug addicts coming forward to seek a pay day.

"With national headlines and all these people lining up, you'd have to be more skeptical" of the claims, Rossiter said.

"Obviously, you have to do a detailed interview" with each alleged victim, he said, asking questions such as, "Who did you tell, when did you tell them? And who can corroborate your story?"

"That's what you do, you investigate," Rossiter said. "The key," he said, is to find corroboration for the victim's story, to see if their stories hold up.

"A good interviewer could have broken somebody who was fabricating something," Rossiter said. Especially if you drag them through all the details of what the Penn State locker room looked like, to determine "whether they were really in the shower."

The surest way to spot a fake, Rossiter said, is to come at their story from the opposite point of view.

In investigating cases for the archdiocese, Rossiter said, "I have to go into it believing the victim is telling the truth." If the detective merely tried to help the church cover up abuse, "I'm of no value to anyone," Rossiter said.

So he always gave the victim "a clean slate," the benefit of the doubt, Rossiter said. Then, the former FBI agent set out to try and corroborate the victims' stories. In seeking proof, Rossiter went as far as to polygraph priests accused of abuse.

As far as the Penn State case was concerned, Rossiter was surprised to hear that apparently not one of the 36 alleged victims supposedly told anyone about the attacks when they allegedly occurred -- a period that spanned nearly four decades.

If a pedophile was running loose for that long, "You would think someone would pick it up," Rossiter said. "Either at school or the parents or a close friend."

Rossiter was also troubled by the use of recovered memories by many alleged victims of Sandusky.

"I always have my doubts about that," he said. The radically changing stories of many of the victims was another source of concern for an investigator playing defense on claims. Rossiter said he couldn't understand why the university didn't do more to investigate claims of abuse.

When the father of Brett Swisher-Houtz read the story by Sara Ganim in the Patriot-News about how a grand jury was investigating Jerry Sandusky for sex abuse, he advised his son, a former Second Mile alum, to hire lawyer Benjamin Andreozzi, who specialized in taking sex assault cases on contingency.

But when Andreozzi first came to see him on April 5, 2011, Swisher-Houtz wasn’t cooperative, and didn’t say anything had happened to him. Two days later, when a state police corporal knocked on his door, Swisher-Houtz said he wanted to talk to his lawyer before he talked to police.

On April 21, 2011, Pennsylvania State Troopers Joseph Leiter and Scott Rossman interviewed Swisher-Houtz at the police barracks, with his attorney present, and a tape recorder running. This time, Swisher-Houtz was more cooperative.

During the first 50 minutes of questioning, as recounted in trial transcripts, Swisher-Houtz told the troopers about wrestling matches with Sandusky, and how Sandusky would pin him to the floor with his genitals allegedly stuck in the boy’s face. Then, Sandusky would allegedly kiss and lick the inside of the boy’s legs, Swisher-Houtz claimed. That prompted Trooper Rossman to ask if Sandusky would kiss or lick his testicles.

“Kind of,” he replied, but the state troopers suspected the witness was holding back graphic details of more serious abuse.

Cops Caught Lying

While Swisher-Houtz smoked a cigarette outside, the two state troopers talked with Houtz’s lawyer, unaware that the tape-recorder was still running. On tape, the troopers talked about how it had taken months to coax rape details out of Aaron Fisher, "Victim No. 1" in the Sandusky case.

“First, it was, 'Yeah, he would rub my shoulders;' then it took repetition and repetition and finally, we got to the point where he [Fisher] would tell us what happened,” Leiter said. The troopers talked about how they were sure Swisher-Houtz was another rape victim, and they discussed how to get more details out of him.

Andreozzi had a helpful suggestion: “Can we at some point say to him, ‘Listen, we have interviewed other kids and other kids have told us that there was intercourse and that they have admitted this, you know. Is there anything else you want to tell us?’”

“Yep, we do that with all the other kids,” Leiter said.

When Swisher-Houtz returned, Leiter told him, “I just want to let you know you are not the first victim we have spoken to.” The trooper told him about nine adults the police had already interviewed, and said, “It is amazing. If this was a book, you would have been repeating, word for word, pretty much what a lot of people have already told us.”

At that point, the troopers had only interviewed three alleged victims who claimed they’d been abused, and only one – Aaron Fisher – had alleged prolonged abuse.

“I don’t want you to feel ashamed because you are a victim in this whole thing,” Trooper Leiter told Swisher-Houtz. “[Sandusky] took advantage of you . . . We need you to tell us as graphically as you can what took place... I just want you to understand that you are not alone in this. By no means are you alone in this.”

At their request, Swisher-Houtz became more graphic, asserting that Sandusky used to pin him face down in the shower, then hump the boy’s buttocks until he ejaculated. Sandusky, he claimed, would also push his penis into the boy’s face until he had an orgasm.

By the time Sandusky went on trial on June 11, 2012, Swisher-Houtz was the prosecution’s leadoff witness. He testified that for years Sandusky had inserted his penis into the boy’s mouth two or three times a week while they showered, sometimes with Sandusky ejaculating. It happened “40 times at least,” Swisher-Houtz told the jury.

Sandusky also attempted to anally rape him in the shower, the witness claimed, but that he pushed Sandusky off “with all my might” and got away.

When asked by Sandusky’s attorney why he hadn’t initially said he was abused, the witness testified, “I have spent, you know, so many years burying this in the back of my mind forever.”

Author Mark Pendergrast wrote a book about the Sandusky case. He's skeptical about Swisher-Houtz’s claims of repressed memories of abuse, as well as similar claims from three of the eight other alleged victims who testified against Sandusky at trial.

“All of the recovered memories in the Sandusky case are most certainly false,” said Pendergrast, who wrote The Most Hated Man In America; Jerry Sandusky and the Rush to Judgment, a book that's been excerpted on Big Trial.

“They shouldn’t even be called memories," Pendergrast said about so-called repressed memories of abuse; "they’re confabulations.”

“This entire case started because therapist Mike Gillum saw Aaron Fisher as a patient,” Pendergrast said. Gillum “used incredibly leading methodology and got over-involved” with his patient, Pendergrast said, to the point where “Aaron Fisher became convinced that he remembered traumatic abuse that probably didn’t happen.”

In the Aaron Fisher case, Fisher, then 15, told school officials about his physical contact with Sandusky, but didn’t describe it as overtly sexual. A youth services counselor advised Fisher's mother to bring her son to psychotherapist Gillum.

Starting at the first session, and continuing during weekly and sometimes daily sessions, Gillum asked leading questions, and Fisher began to recall multiple instances of Sandusky fondling him and forcing him to participate in oral sex.

In Silent No More, a 2012 book Gillum co-authored with Fisher and his mother, Gillum wrote that he saw his job as “peeling back the layers of the onion” in Fisher’s mind to uncover hidden memories of abuse.

“Look, I know that something terrible happened to you,” Gillum told Fisher at the first session. And then Gillum would guess how Sandusky had abused Fisher. The patient simply had to say “yes,” or just nod his head to confirm the allegation that Sandusky had committed a sex crime.

After three years of such therapy, Fisher, became convinced that Sandusky had abused him more than 100 times between 2005 and 2008. Those crimes allegedly included oral sex and touching the boy’s genitals. The abuse allegedly took place at various locations, including Sandusky’s home and car, in hotel rooms, at Fisher’s school and on the Penn State campus.

“Mike just kept saying that Jerry was the exact profile of a predator,” Fisher wrote in Silent No More. “When it finally sank in, I felt angry.”

The psychotherapist accompanied Fisher to police interviews, and when he testified before two grand juries. During those two years, Fisher, then the only alleged victim the authorities had in the case, repeatedly broke down crying in front of the first grand jury, and could not elaborate on details of his alleged abuse.

When asked if Sandusky had forced him to engage in oral sex, Fisher denied it. Gillum then volunteered to testify on his client’s behalf, on the grounds that the teenager was too emotionally fragile to continue. But that didn't happen. When a second grand jury convened to investigate Sandusky, Fisher testified by reading a written statement about his alleged abuse.

In 2013, the university paid Fisher, whose lawyer, Andrew Shubin, did not respond to requests for comment, a confidential settlement of $7.5 million.

In 2016, Gillum also began counseling Glenn Neff, another alleged victim, who, according to Neff's claim of abuse, "will be seen in psychotherapy with Michael Gillum, M.A., for the foreseeable future."

Pendergrast says there’s nothing scientific about the claim that people can repress memories of traumatic events.

“Everything we know about the science of memory shows that the things that we remember the best are the most traumatic events that happen to us." The problem people have with traumatic memories, Pendergrast said, is they can’t forget them.

“That’s what PTSD is,” Pendergrast said, referring to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. “There’s no convincing evidence whatsoever that people can forget years of traumatic events.”

But at the Sandusky trial, the prosecution presented repressed memory theory as fact. Before calling his witnesses, the prosecutor, Joseph McGettigan, told the jury that he would have to “press these young men for the details of their victimization,” because “they don’t want to remember.” That’s why the investigation was slow,” McGettigan said, because “the doors of people’s minds” were closed.

After a jury found Sandusky guilty, then Pennsylvania Attorney General Linda Kelly held a press conference outside the courthouse.

About the alleged victims, Kelly said, “It was incredibly difficult for some of them to unearth long-buried memories of the shocking abuse they suffered at the hands of this defendant.”

No Credible Scientific Support

Another critic of recovered memory therapy is Dr. Elizabeth Loftus, one of the world’s foremost experts on the malleability of human memory. Loftus, who testified at a hearing on behalf of Sandusky’s unsuccessful bid for a new trial, has given lectures to the Secret Service and FBI; she also has a contract to work for the CIA

On May 11, 2017, testifying by phone, Loftus told Judge John Foradora, “There is no credible scientific support for this idea of massive repression." Nor is there any credible support, she added, for the idea that “you need psychotherapy to dig it out, and you can reliably recover these memories . . . in order to heal yourself.” In many jurisdictions, she told the judge, cases involving repressed memories have been thrown out of court.

image: https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-rTK9JTlfw...46.14%2BPM.png
Human memory “doesn’t work like a recording device” that can simply be played back at a later date, Loftus told the judge. Memories evolve over time and can be distorted or contaminated with suggestive and leading questioning. Her experiments have also shown that people can be talked into believing things that aren’t true.

“You can plant entirely false memories in the minds of people for events that never happened,” she explained. And once those false memories are planted, she told the judge, people will relate those memories as if they were true, “complete with high levels of detail and emotion.”

In her experiments, Loftus said, “We have successfully convinced ordinary, otherwise healthy people, that they were lost in the shopping mall” when they were five- or six-years-old, “that they were frightened, cried and had to be rescued by an elderly person and reunited with the family.” Other researchers have planted false memories about being “nearly drowned” as a child, and “rescued by a lifeguard,” she testified. People have been convinced that they were “attacked by a vicious animal,” Loftus added, or that they committed a serious crime as a teenager.

During the appeal hearing, Loftus said, “It seems pretty evident that there were drastic changes in the testimony of some of the [Sandusky] accusers.” One reason for those changes, she testified, was the “highly suggestive” way police and psychotherapists interviewed them.

Rap Sheets

While Penn State was paying out claims, the university didn't run background checks on the alleged victims. If they had, university officials would have discovered that 12 of the 36 claimants had criminal records, which experts such as former FBI Agent Rossiter say should have only increased suspicions about credibility.

At Penn State, the alleged victim with the most extensive criminal record is Ryan Rittmeyer, represented by Joel J. Feller, who did not respond to a request for comment.

On November 29, 2011, Rittmeyer called the Pennsylvania state attorney general’s sex abuse hotline; he subsequently became Victim “No. 10” in the Sandusky case.

Rittmeyer’s rap sheet features 17 arrests from 2005 to 2016. They include arrests for reckless endangerment [he pled guilty and was sent to prison for 60 days], theft by deception and false impression [he pled guilty and got six months in jail and two years probation], receiving stolen property, a second count of theft by deception and false impression [he pled guilty and was put on probation for a year], criminal solicitation and robbery to inflict or threaten immediate bodily harm [he pled guilty and went to jail for 21 months] simple assault, and possession of a firearm [he pled guilty, went to jail for six months, and was put on probation for one year].

After he called the sex abuse hotline, Rittmeyer told the cops that Sandusky had groped him at a swimming pool and then attempted to have oral sex while driving him around in a silver convertible. Sandusky supposedly told Rittmeyer that if he didn’t submit, he would never see his family again.

On December 5, 2011, Rittmeyer testified before the grand jury, and changed his story to claim he saw Sandusky once or twice a month during 1997, 1998, and part of 1999, and that something sexual occurred almost every time. He claimed that he and Sandusky usually engaged in oral sex.

The problems with Rittmeyer’s story start with the car.

“Jerry Sandusky never owned a silver convertible,” said Dick Anderson, a retired coach who was a colleague of Sandusky’s for decades on the Penn State coaching staff, and has known Sandusky since 1962, when they were Nittany Lions teammates. “He drove Fords or Hondas.”

Another retired assistant coach who was a colleague of Sandusky’s, Booker Brooks, said that when he first heard about the convertible, “I laughed out loud.” Because nobody on the coaching staff drove a convertible, Brooks says.

Assistant coaches drove cars donated by local dealers, Brooks said. That’s because they had to pick up star high school recruits at airports, as well as their families. The cars the assistant coaches drove, Brooks said, needed to have four doors and a big trunk for luggage.

In spite of his lengthy criminal record and his questionable claim, Penn State didn’t subject Rittmeyer to a deposition with a lawyer, or an evaluation from a psychiatrist. Instead, after reviewing the paperwork for his claim, the university in 2013 paid Rittmeyer, 26, of Ellicott City, MD, $5.5 million.

The Grooming Process

According to records of the claims, Zachary Konstas, the 11 year-old boy who took a shower with Sandusky back in 1998, was of the few claimants who was actually deposed. On June 18, 2015, Konstas was videotaped during a deposition he gave in a civil case, John Doe 6 v. Penn State, The Second Mile and Gerald Sandusky.

It was Konstas's mother who was the first person to complain to authorities after she found out that her son had taken a shower with Sandusky. When questioned by police, Sandusky admitted that he had given the boy a bear-hug in the shower, and lifted him up to the shower head so he could wash shampoo out of his hair, but he denied any sexual abuse, as did Konstas.

Various authorities came to the same conclusion. After an investigation by the Penn State police, the Centre County District Attorney and a psychologist and investigator on behalf of the county’s Children and Youth Services, no evidence of sex abuse was found.

The psychologist who interviewed the boy for an hour wrote, “The behavior exhibited by Mr. Sandusky is directly consistent with what can be seen as an expected daily routine of being a football coach.” The psychologist, who interviewed several high school and college football coaches, wrote that it was “not uncommon for them to shower with their players.”

Konstas subsequently hired a lawyer and entered psychotherapy. He then contended that although Sandusky had never abused him, he was “grooming” him for future abuse. At Sandusky’s 2012 trial, Konstas testified that in addition to lifting him up to the showerhead to wash the shampoo out of his hair, Sandusky had slowly lathered him up with soap; Konstas also claimed that when Sandusky lifted him up he had “blacked out,” and could not remember whatever else might have happened.

After Sandusky was convicted, Konstas, 29, of Colorado Springs, CO sued Penn State in the civil courts claiming he had been abused.

In his civil claim, Konstas alleged that Sandusky used Penn State's showers to create "his own personal peep show" starring the 11-year-old boy as the victim. And that during the shower, Sandusky, playing "The Tickle Monster," used the tickling "as a pretense to put his hands over [Konstas's] adolescent body."

In 2015, Konstas collected a confidential settlement of $1.5 million.

But the university didn't say yes to all the claimants. Three claims were rejected, for unspecified reasons.

One of those rejected claims was filed by by an inmate. Shamont Sapp, 49, acting as his own lawyer claimed that from 1978 to 1984, Sandusky took him along on trips where he met with the commissioner of the Big 8 conference in St. Louis, attended Celtics games in Boston, and visited the home of the late former PSU President John Oswald.

Sapp also claimed that Sandusky frequently paid him for sex with Sandusky and other men, including former Centre County D.A. Ray Gricar, who disappeared in 2005 and was subsequently declared dead.

Sapp, who in his claim explained that he didn't testify at Sandusky's trial because he "was in prison in Oklahoma at the time," pled guilty to assault in 1999, and pled guilty to theft by deception in 2015.

In a letter to a judge, Sapp made some more allegations, claiming that he spoke to PSU President Spanier on the phone in 2011 and told him he had been sexually assaulted by Sandusky, and that Spanier called him a liar. In the same letter, Sapp claimed that "Joe Paterno caught us once in Sandusky's office naked from the waist down."

But not even Penn State was willing to grant a settlement from a guy who was filing his claim from jail, because they rejected Sapp's claim.

"It Just Doesn't Make Common Sense"

Some of the newer civil claims filed against Sandusky and Penn State reached the furthest back in time; they are also among the most improbable.

Michael Quinn, “John Doe 150,” was represented by Slade McLaughlin, who represented “Billy Doe” in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia sex abuse scandal, as well as 11 other alleged victims at Penn State.

In the Philadelphia case, “Billy Doe,” whose real name is Danny Gallagher, claimed to have been repeatedly raped when he was a 10 and 11-year-old altar boy by two priests and a Catholic school teacher. He collected $5 million in a civil settlement with the Philadelphia archdiocese, but his story has since been shredded by a retired Philadelphia police detective who was the lead investigator on the case.

Retired Detective Joe Walsh testified and wrote in a 12-page affidavit that he repeatedly caught Gallagher in one lie after another, and that Gallagher even admitted to the detective that he “just made up stuff and told them anything.”

But at least Gallagher had to work for his money. In his civil case against the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, Gallagher was examined extensively by two forensic psychiatrists, who found him non-credible. Gallagher also had to submit to two full days of depositions, where he handled all the factual contradictions in his many changing stories of abuse by claiming he didn't remember more than 130 times.

Gallagher's lawyer also claims that Gallagher passed a polygraph test. But when asked for proof, the lawyer has repeatedly declined to share the results of the test, which is not admissible in court.

A problem for the archdiocese, however, was that Gallagher's civil case was slated to go to trial the month before Pope Francis was scheduled to visit Philadelphia for a historic visit in September 2015. Church officials, who had been skeptical of Gallagher's claims, subsequently decided to settle the case and pay the former altar boy $5 million.

In the Penn State case, Quinn -- "John Doe 150" -- claimed that when he was in ninth grade, he attended a summer camp on the Penn State campus sponsored by The Second Mile. At that camp, Sandusky, whom Quinn had never met, supposedly came up to him in the shower and without even saying hello, soaped him up, and stuck his finger in the boy’s anus.

Here, the story takes a couple of incredulous turns.

In his claim against Penn State, Quinn asserted that as a ninth grader, he had the gumption to immediately tell several Penn State football players about what Sandusky had supposedly done to him.

Even more incredibly, Quinn claimed that the next day, he tracked down legendary Coach Paterno in a hallway outside the coach’s office and supposedly confronted Paterno about what Sandusky had allegedly done to him.

According to Quinn's claim, Paterno allegedly replied, “I don’t want to hear about any of that kind of stuff, I have a football season to worry about.”

When he first heard the details of Quinn’s allegations, Franco Harris, a Penn State star from the 1970s, and an NFL Hall-of-Famer, told reporter John Ziegler that Quinn’s story about allegedly tracking down and confronting Paterno was “unbelievable . . . It just doesn’t make common sense.”

It didn’t matter. Even though his claim was decades past the statute of limitations, which in Pennsylvania, for victims of sex abuse, is age 30, on Sept. 12, 2013, Quinn, 56, of Plains, PA, was paid a confidential settlement by Penn State of $300,000.

"All of my Penn State clients were solid people, and told the truth as far I know," McLaughlin wrote in an email. "If I had reason to disbelieve a client's story, I either rejected the case or had the client undergo a lie detector test. Not that facts like that matter to a so-called journalist like you. . . . You are a low life, bottom of the pit scumbag . . ."

A year after Quinn got paid, he was called as a witness to testify on Oct 13, 2014, in the civil case where Penn State’s insurance carrier sued the university.

“Have you ever been interviewed by anybody from Penn State regarding your claim,” asked lawyer Steven J. Engelmyer, on behalf of the university's insurance carrier.

Re: NCAA Penn State Penalties

When it comes to sex abuse, as evidenced in the recent U.S. Senate confirmation hearings over Judge Kavanaugh, the media frequently goes for sensation over substance, hysteria over rational thought.
Another prime case of this type of malpractice occurred at Penn State, where the media for years has refused to re-examine what can only be described as an ongoing legal travesty of epic proportions.
As documented on my blog, the entire investigation at Penn State is contaminated by official misconduct. The headline allegation of the grand jury presentment — the alleged rape of a 10-year-old boy in the showers — is a work of fiction. A couple of decades later, no victim has ever come forward. And the only alleged witness to that alleged event, former Penn State assistant coach Mike McQueary, isn’t credible, as determined by a former NCIS special agent who conducted a contemporaneous and previously unknown federal investigation of the so-called sex scandal and alleged coverup.
In the Penn State scandal, the prosecutors were unethical crusaders who broke the law by repeatedly leaking grand jury secrets and trampling on the constitutional rights of the accused, The police were caught on tape deliberately lying to alleged victims. Psychologists in the case relied on scientifically-discredited recovered memory therapy. Former FBI Director Louie Freeh conducted an “independent” investigation of the scandal that was marred by factual mistakes and unsubstantiated opinions. And the university’s board of trustees not only are engaged in an ongoing coverup of Freeh’s botched report, but they also failed in their fiduciary duties by failing to do anything to investigate the allegations of 36 alleged victims, who hopped on the gravy train and collected a total of $118 million. You won’t find any of these facts in the mainstream media, but all of this has been documented on my blog: